The History of Injecting, Part Two: Wire in the blood.
By the turn of the 20th century, the same journals that once celebrated morphine and cocaine were now warning of “habitual users,” while newspapers railed against “dope fiends” and “morphinists.” The Los Angeles Herald of December 11, 1898, ran the lurid headline: “Cocaine Monster Throws His Tentacles Around the Nation.”
“Cocaine, the modern devil drug, has found its way into every city and town in the Union. From the Atlantic to the Pacific its victims may be found, men and women who, once having yielded to its seductive influence, are bound hand and foot in its fearful slavery.”
At the centre of it all was the hypodermic syringe. Its needle left marks on the skin, visible evidence of a secret life, a hidden failing and shame. The coverage terrified the public and reflected moral judgment rather than medical understanding. Doctors, once seen as saviours, began to be viewed with suspicion. Patients who had once been treated, were rebranded as addicts, morally deficient, even criminal, and were increasingly afraid to ask for help.
The Herald went on:
“The cocaine fiend is easily known. His face is pale and ghastly, his eyes wild and staring, his movements nervous and uncertain. He lives in a world of his own creation, a world of distorted fancies and dreadful hallucinations.”
Conspiracies spread that drugs were being used to control the people and to profit pharmaceutical companies, no matter the human cost, and there was reason to think so. In 1898, Bayer trademarked “Heroin” and promoted it worldwide as a non-addictive substitute for morphine. It was sold as cough syrup, lozenges, even children’s medicine. Around the same time, Parke-Davis flooded the market with cocaine tonics and injectable solutions, boasting they “banished fatigue” and “made the coward brave.” Every jab of the syringe bound dependence to profit, and the profiteers were certain that the former was a price worth paying (by others) for the latter. Addiction guaranteed demand. It wasn’t a side effect; it was the business model. While the companies publicly denied or downplayed the risks, they built empires on misery. And the syringe was there through it all, ensuring a built-in customer base.
Illustration: Detail from “The Age of Drugs” by Louis Dalrymple, published in Puck (October 1900). The scene depicts the inside of a bustling drugstore
Governments moved in. The 1912 Hague Convention placed heroin alongside morphine and cocaine, restricting them to medical use and requiring nations to monitor their trade and production. Few countries signed on before the First World War, but peace treaties later made it global. Two years later, the United States passed the Harrison Act, compelling doctors and pharmacists to register and pay a tax. Those who prescribed to “habitual users” were prosecuted, transforming addiction from a medical condition into a crime, and those who used to ease their pain were now legislated as criminals. Respectability was gone. The morphine-using housewife was erased from the imagination, though she was still there. Instead, opiate and cocaine use, especially injecting, was tied to immigrant neighbourhoods and urban poverty. The “addict” was reimagined as a racialised threat, a danger to order.
Clinics closed, supplies dried up, and people turned to the black market. In desperation, many turned to injecting, chasing stronger effects from dwindling supplies.
Other drugs flooded markets. By the 1930s, Amphetamines, the new wonder drugs, were being sold as treatments for low mood and fatigue, lethargy and almost every other condition you can imagine. They helped the overweight slim down, the housewife face daily chores, the businessman get over the slump.
Benzedrine sulphate
They were handed out to soldiers on both sides of the Second World War to march longer and sleep less. The British distributed 72 million amphetamine tablets during the war. German soldiers on the Western Front alone were given 35 million Pervitin (methamphetamine) doses. Some believe, although it remains unproven, that the German army’s reliance on methamphetamine, rather than the Allies’ amphetamine, helped drive its soldiers to greater extremes of violence. Methamphetamine certainly hits harder and lasts longer than amphetamine, sharpening aggression and stripping empathy in ways the milder drug rarely does.
Harry “The Hipster” Gibson
After the war, surplus Benzedrine from military stockpiles flooded civilian markets in the U.S., U.K., and Australia. Doctors handed it out freely, and “pep pills” became a postwar craze Benzedrine was common enough by 1944 that Jazz pianist, Harry the hipster Gibson released a song that highlighted the problem, ‘Who Put the Benzedrine in Mrs. Murphy’s Ovaltine”.
She stays up nights making all the rounds
They say she lost about 69 pounds
Now Mr. Murphy claims she’s getting awful thin
And all she says is, “Give me some skin.” Mop!
Who put the Benzedrine, in Mrs. Murphy’s Ovaltine?
Now she wants to swing the Highland Fling
She says that Benzedrine’s the thing that makes her spring
By now it was a natural progression for drugs like amphetamines to end up in syringes. The image of the junkie hardened: poor, diseased, criminal. But beneath the skin, the drive to use didn’t stop — it pulsed on, that same trilling wire in the blood that T.S. Eliot wrote of,
The trilling wire in the blood
Sings below inveterate scars,
Appeasing long-forgotten wars.
The wire in the blood never stopped, the pulse of life and old trauma still running underneath, when the scars are deep even when the wars that caused them are long over.
In Australia, injecting was increasingly associated with poverty and social deviance rather than respectability. Small heroin imports made it into the country but remained relatively rare until later. By the 70s, Southeast Asia’s Golden Triangle became a major supplier of heroin. Cheap, plentiful, and potent heroin flowed into Australia, especially Sydney and Melbourne. Injecting took hold as the dominant mode of use. This period saw sharp rises in dependence, overdoses, and hepatitis B and C transmission.
In Vietnam, American soldiers had easy access to cheap, high-grade heroin, and many used it daily. Research by Lee Robins found that about a third of US troops tried heroin during their service, and one in five showed signs of dependence. When they came home, the media warned of an army of addicts. In reality, only 1% became re-addicted within a year, though around 10% used heroin again after returning.
In American cities, heroin was spreading, particularly among Black and Latino communities. Policing intensified. Possessing a syringe could mean prison. Courts, not clinics, became the main point of contact for people who injected.
Yet in kitchens, squats, and cars, users kept teaching each other how to survive, how to clean equipment, filter shots, and find veins. It was harm reduction before the phrase even existed. The wire in the blood that drove drug use also drove people to find ways to keep each other alive when no one else would.
Nixon declared a “war on drugs” which was a war on the people who used them, and as always, where America led, Australia followed. By now, the syringe was cemented as a sign of moral decay. By the early ’80s, another war was unfolding: this time against a virus. As HIV spread through shared equipment, governments hesitated, churches moralised, and police kept arresting. But again, drug users looked after one another, passing on clean equipment, information, and care long before policy caught up.
Next time: Nixon’s War and the Bug